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Example research essay topic: Civil Rights Movement Presidential Campaign - 1,818 words

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Civil Rights History The Civil Rights Movement created many African American leaders. John Lewis and Cleveland Sellers are found to be among those leaders. To understand the reasons and motivation for their activities, it is necessary to trace all their life histories and look at the conditions where they were born and grew up. Taking nonviolence and civil disobedience as the sword of struggle, Lewis together with his friends has carried his idea of racial and civil rights equality throughout his life. Born in the family of Alabama sharecropper, John Lewis is now a sixth-term United States Congressman. He has lived an extraordinary life.

Lewis's leadership in the Nashville movement became a model for the civil rights movement of the 1960 s. His participation in the Freedom Rides challenge segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South in 1961. He risked his life and was beaten severely by mobs for participating in the rides. During the height of the civil rights movement, from 1963 to 1966, Lewis was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SNCC was responsible for the activities of students in the struggle for civil rights. Regardless of his young age at that time, Lewis became a leader in the civil rights movement.

At the age of 23, he was one of the planners and a keynote speaker at the "March on Washington" in August 1963. In 1964, he coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the "Mississippi Freedom Summer. " His first electoral success came in 1981 when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council. This past November, he was elected to his seventh consecutive term in the U. S. House of Representatives. Lewis co-wrote Walking with the Wind with Michael D'Or.

The title is based on one of Lewis's childhood experiences. At the age of 4, he and 15 young cousins and relatives literally "walked with the wind" as it threatened to pick up first one side and then the other of his aunt's tin-roof house during a severe thunderstorm in rural Alabama. This childhood experience became the profound foundation for Lewis future struggles and also served as motivation throughout his life. Lewis wrote: "Our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another... But the people of conscience never left the house...

They clasped hands and moved toward the corner of the house that was the weakest... That is America to me -- not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole. " Lewis' accounts of his childhood, education, participation in the civil rights movement and finally election to Congress shows a way strewn with huge amounts of obstacles. But through every problem encountered, Lewis faith enlarged with the Gandhian concept of "satyagraha, " or "steadfastness in truth, the way to inner and outer freedom. In Walking with the Wind, Lewis describes the discrimination that was in the society he grew up in.

He remembers his mother telling him how he must behave around white people. There were separate eating facilities for black and white people. He also remembered how it was dangerous to travel through other Southern states. The story of the book, is the path to which Lewis has been committed since he turned from a boy to a man, and to which he remains committed today. It is the path that goes beyond the issue of race alone, and beyond class as well, extending to the hearts of people and making them believe in the community and love. Gender, age and every other distinction that tends to separate the people as human beings rather than bring us together are things to be considered.

Lewis says that that path involves nothing less than the pursuit of the most precious and pure concept people have ever known. John discovered this idea as a young man. It has guided him like a beacon ever since, a concept called the Beloved Community. Describing his book, John says that that walk is a struggle to find the beloved community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies to individuals, but it can only be achieved by the common community. As it is said, written with charm, warmth, and honesty, Walking with the Wind offers the inner picture of the movement and the people of all the civil rights leaders.

Walking With The Wind is a powerful rendering of the black experience at a critical time in America. It describes what was happening in the struggles and what led to triumphs. While there have been exceptional books on the movement, there has never been a front-line account by a man like John Lewis is really considered to be a true American hero. His story became a classic in civil rights literature. Community, racial equality and nonviolence in the means of reaching such goals appeared to stay as the basis for the civil rights movement. Once, Lewis accepted the philosophy of nonviolence, not as a tactic or technique, but as a way of life.

He decided that he would not become a bitter or hostile person. He believes that all the humanity must grow to be at peace inside. He has an opinion, which is clearly seen as an inference in his book, that all people, regardless of race, have to treat others as brothers and sisters. He writes about the civil rights movement: I look at all human beings as belonging to one big family.

If we had used violence instead of nonviolence, the movement for social justice would have failed. Many of the opposition, including law enforcement and elected officials, would have felt that they were justified to use violence against us. There was no way possible for us to win an armed conflict. This philosophy brought success to the Civil Rights Movement.

Another well known activist in the civil rights history is Cleveland Sellers. He was born and raised in Denmark. Sellers became interested in the civil rights movement as a youngster when he heard about the murder of Email Till. Sellers organized his first lunch counter sit-in at the age of fifteen. His father was always against his sons activities. Once he forbade further radical action.

This way, Sellers became inactive in the civil rights movement till the time when he was a sophomore at Howard University in 1964. At the university, he showed protests against George Wallace's presidential campaign. Later Sellers joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. At that time, the organization was led by Solely Carmichael. Sellers began to work with SNCC's voter registration effort in Mississippi. In 1965, Sellers was elected program director of SNCC.

In 1966 Sellers got acquainted with King when he took part in the march across Mississippi following the murder of James Merideth. Sellers was in the crowd when Carmichael began chanting the words "Black Power, " which would become the rallying cry of the radical wing of the civil rights movement. Struggling in a long legal battle, Sellers spent several years in prison before this charge was finally dropped. During his time in prison, he completed his autobiography, The River of No Return. Sellers turned to be a victim of the system. That situation in his life gave his motivation to struggle for his rights and freedom.

More than that, this struggle became the meaning of his life. Being written in hard life conditions, The River of No Return appeared to be the mirror of the true situation in the society. This book is considered to be one of the two or three most important books to come out of the civil rights movement. Following his release from prison, Sellers returned to college, found a job as a city official in Greensboro, ran for public office, worked on the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and earned his Ph.

D. in education. Currently, he teaches in the African American Studies Department at the University of South Carolina. The River of No Return is an autobiography of an African American militant, Cleveland Sellers, who was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1960 's. He writes about Le Roi Jones and his significance to Cultural Nationalists, a group who felt that blacks had to get themselves together culturally before they could overtly attack the system. Part of this involved a focus on the "revolutionary function of black art. " Ron Karen, the leader of one of these groups, felt that "Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution.

It must be like Le Roi Jones' poems. " Cleveland Sellers had been the program director of SNCC and was present during the Orangeburg Massacre. Students from South Carolina State had been demonstrating outside a bowling alley which refused to integrate, even though he was supposed to after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Afterwards the Highway Patrol surrounded their campus and shot at them, killing three students and wounding many others. Cleveland Sellers was imprisoned on charges of starting a riot. The police had no evidence, but they said the night before the Massacre they heard him say "burn baby burn" on top of a fire truck, which was a complete lie.

Though Sellers noted great strides made in America toward better racial relations, he believes changes are still needed: "We are again at a point where we need to reassess our ideals and reach a new paradigm, " Sellers said. "Even now as we begin to enter the 21 st century, there still exist two communities, separate and unequal. " Sellers also noted that philosophies of individualism and materialism have replaced compassion in American society: "Now we are witnessing a more subtle but no less intolerant attitude in campaigns of welfare reform and anti-affirmative action. " Both civil rights activists have been passing a challenging way of struggle for the equal rights for the people of different races. Regardless of their difficult childhood and life, they managed to achieve their goal to prove that they are simply the same people with the same rights. They experienced violence and hatred on themselves, but they did not leave their peaceful way of struggle. Uniting people and showing the way to the freedom were the primary reasons for the success of the movement. Regardless of many changes that happened within time, the spirit of unity and freedom was brought throughout the years up to this time, giving hope to the people. Bibliography: Cleveland Sellers.

River of No Return. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc. , 1983. John Lewis. Walking with the Wind. New York: The Viking Press, 1994. Walter L.

John Lewis. African American Biographies. N. C. : McFarland & Company, 1992.


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Research essay sample on Civil Rights Movement Presidential Campaign

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